Senior Data Engineer

Job Description

About the role

At Halter, data is the lifeblood of everything we build. Every second, collars stream behavioural, location, and health signals from cows in paddocks across the globe. Pair that with remote sensing, grazing data and pasture cover, and you have the foundation for helping farmers make smarter decisions every single day.

But that’s only one piece. Internally, we rely on production data from our manufacturing floor, field performance data from collars in the wild, and product analytics to shape how we build and scale. We’re looking for a Data Engineer with strong backend instincts to join our Data Engineering team to build the pipelines that make all of this work together.

Day-to-day you’ll partner closely with our machine learning, product, and platform teams to design systems that are reliable, observable, and ready for what’s next. Whether it’s optimising ingestion for billions of daily events, building robust transformation layers, connecting disparate data sources into a coherent whole, or ensuring data quality at scale you’ll own problems end-to-end. If you want your work to have a tangible impact on how the world farms, this is the role for you.

What you’ll be responsible for

• Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines that move data reliably from source to insight.
• Own data modelling decisions: clean schemas, sensible abstractions, and infrastructure that scales with the business.
• Work closely with machine learning, product, and platform teams to ensure data is accessible, accurate, and ready when they need it.
• Apply AI tools (like Claude Code or Cursor) to improve velocity while keeping pipelines easy to understand and evolve.
• Champion data quality by building validation, monitoring, and alerting so issues surface before they cause problems downstream.
• Help define and evolve data practices and standards across the organisation, balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term maintainability.
• Support and mentor other engineers through design conversations, code reviews, and generous context sharing.
• Stay hands-on, helping shape not just the plumbing, but the data products that drive decisions.
• Contribute to the reliability and freshness of our data systems, especially when things get tricky at scale.
• Help evolve our testing strategies, CI/CD workflows, and infrastructure patterns for data.

Who we’re looking for

• You have strong experience building and maintaining data pipelines for mission-critical systems, with a solid grasp of batch and streaming patterns.
• You have a confident understanding of data engineering best practices: modelling, transformation, orchestration, and quality assurance.
• You’re familiar with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS. We use Athena, S3, Kinesis, SQS, and SNS, but experience with similar tools translates well.
• You understand how to build systems that are observable, testable, and easy to debug
• You’re a product-minded engineer. You care about why we’re building something, not just how.
• You embrace ambiguity. At Halter, the problems worth solving rarely come with a clear spec. You’re comfortable navigating uncertainty and making pragmatic calls.
• You’re deeply curious and motivated by impact. Bonus points if you’re genuinely interested in agriculture, but what matters most is that you want your work to matter.
• You’re a highly effective collaborator. You lift the people around you through clear communication, generous knowledge sharing, and a low ego.
• Importantly, we’re looking for someone who is passionate about what they do and eager to learn.

Why our team loves working at Halter

At Halter, we’re committed to creating an environment where people thrive. We offer unlimited paid annual leave, as well as additional wellness days. Each year, every team member receives a $1,000 self-development budget to invest in whatever fuels their personal growth.

We offer six months of fully paid leave for primary caregivers and four weeks of fully paid leave for secondary caregivers, along with a range of additional family-friendly benefits. To support your wellbeing, we offer subsidised health insurance through Southern Cross.

And finally, everyone at Halter is an owner. Every employee is part of our stock ownership plan; when we succeed, you share in that success.

Our office-first approach

Being office-first is a core pillar of our culture. We believe in-person connections are key to driving your own growth, learning, impact, and building genuine long-lasting relationships.

We’re office first, not office only. This means that working from the office every day is our default setting, but we flex when needed. Your growth, learning, and impact are truly unlimited here, and a big part of that comes from being together, solving problems, innovating, building context, and constantly learning from each other.

We have a state-of-the-art, dog-friendly office in the heart of Auckland City and a test farm in Morrinsville. Delicious snacks and drinks are readily available.

About Halter

At Halter, we’re on a mission to enable farmers and graziers to run the most productive and sustainable operations. Our customers are using Halter to break free from the time-intensive constraints of conventional practices and revolutionizing grazing with Halter. People join Halter to do meaningful work. Our team out-think, out-work and out-care. We’re committed to delivering real change in the world. We’re backed to deliver on a mission that matters by Tier 1 investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, DCVC, BOND, Blackbird, Promus Ventures, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse Ventures.

Join our team

If this opportunity sounds like you, please apply below by sending your cover letter explaining why you’re excited about this role and working at Halter, along with your CV.

If you think you have what it takes but don’t necessarily meet every requirement on this job description, please still get in touch. We’d love to chat to see if you’ll be an epic fit!

Feel free to check out the careers page for more information on working at Halter and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn & Instagram.

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.